I just won a new Intel SSD in a contest. I removed the old SATA hard drive from my laptop and plugged in the new SSD. I turned on my laptop with a Windows 7 installation disk inserted, booted from the Windows disk, and got the screen where it asks which drive to install Windows onto. It said there were no drives detected.

Then I restarted the computer and went into the BIOS and tried to do a "Hard drive diagnostic test" and it said "Hard drive not exist." The SSD also does not show up in the list of bootable devices.

Next, I put my old hard drive back into my laptop and put the SSD in a USB SATA hard drive enclosure. I plugged the enclosure into a USB port and loaded the BIOS again. I looked at the list of bootable devices and the SSD was listed. Then I loaded Windows. Windows did detect the SSD in the Disk Manager and from there I formatted the SSD. Now I am able to see the SSD listed in My Computer as drive "I".

I tried replacing the hard drive with the SSD again and the BIOS still will not detect it. It only detects it when it is plugged in through the USB enclosure. What do I need to do to get it to detect the SSD normally (plugged into the SATA cable inside the laptop)?

Just in case, my laptop is a "HP 2000 Notebook PC", model number qe334ua.

I don't think that's possible. Here's why: My friend who also won the same SSD from the same contest tried his in his laptop and had the exact same problem as me. Then he tried it in his desktop and it worked. I don't have any other computers to try it in, but I think mine would probably work just the same as his.

No, his laptop is not quite the same, although it is also an HP. I actually talked to HP the other day and they told me that my laptop will only support hard drives up to 500GB and no SSDs, so too bad, I guess. Thanks for helping!